NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/text/tex/9427

Text File | 1992-07-22 | 1.6 KB | 41 lines

Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.columbia.edu!cunixa.cc.columbia.edu!jml12
From: [e-mail] (Jonathan M Lennox)
Subject: Hyphenation before punctuation in LaTeX
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (The Network News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: cunixa.cc.columbia.edu
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 03:27:44 GMT
Lines: 28

  I am typesetting a document in LaTeX, and I am getting a lot of
overfull hbox errors resulting, apparenltly, from [La]TeX's inability
to hyphenate a word followed by an em-dash or \dots, even though it
can hyphenate the base word perfectly well.  For instance:

Overfull \hbox (3.95303pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 90--97
[]\twlrm Over breakfast---my arms were out of the slings and I could feed mysel
f---

The word `myself' is normally broken by TeX as `my-self', which would
cause the line to break perfectly well; however, this doesn't work
with the trailing dash.  I can, of course, insert a discretionary
hyphen in the text, but this seems less than ideal, as TeX ought to
know how to break the word already.  \hyphenation also seems to get
confused by punctuation in its argument---I don't know if `---' caused
a problem, but \dots definitely did.

   Is there some way I can tell LaTeX to ignore the trailing
punctuation when trying to hyphenate?

   I'll try to read comp.text.tex, but e-mail replies will be
appreciated--I'll summarize any useful answers I get for the net.

   Thanks to all.

Jonathan Lennox
[e-mail]